Trajectories

The photograph captures an imprint of an object on film, marking its place at a single moment in time. But beyond that arrested moment, the trajectory of the original object through time is no longer addressed. The frozen image continues unaffected, while the object slowly deteriorates and decays. In addressing issues of transience and death, I want to disrupt the artificial process of photographic preservation, deliberately distressing and destroying the negative in order to parallel the existential trajectory that the original object will take beyond the instantaneous ‘snap’ of the photograph. In these images, figures of life, death and grief are depicted side by side with their distressed counterparts. I suggest there is a limit to photography as an inherently preservationist medium. I want to grapple with the mortality and decay that continues in time and space beyond the image, just as we must address these fundamental processes that also act upon us.